Hillary Clinton has announced that she supports removing cannabis as a schedule 1 controlled substance, which means it has “no known medical value” and is in the same category as drugs such as heroin. Clinton wants to reschedule cannabis to schedule 2, the same category as OxyContin and Adderall.

Clinton’s announcement, which was made during a recent town hall^[1] in South Carolina, comes just days after her primary rival, Senator Bernie Sanders, introduced legislation to fully end cannabis prohiibtion on the federal level by removing it entirely from the federal controlled substances list, rather than simply rescheduling it.

Although Clinton’s plan would allow cannabis to be used federally in certain instances and will open the door to far more research, it’s still far from what advocates would want; after all, as a schedule 2 drug it’ll still be listed alongside methamphetamine.

“What I do want is for us to support research into medical marijuana because a lot more states have passed medical marijuana than have legalized marijuana, so we’ve got two different experiences or even experiments going on right now,” says Clinton. “And the problem with medical marijuana is there’s a lot of anecdotal evidence about how well it works for certain conditions, but we haven’t done any research. Why? Because it’s considered what’s called a Schedule I drug and you can’t even do research in it.”

Clinton continues; “If we’re going to have a lot of states setting up marijuana dispensaries so that people who have some kind of medical need are getting marijuana, we need know what’s the quality of it, how much should you take, what should you avoid if you’re taking other medications.”

You can find the full South Caroline town hall, where these comments were made, in the video below:

– TheJointBlog

References

1. ^{^} town hall (www.youtube.com)